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This blog contains articles related to the practicalities around application software development. How should source code control be used? When should secure engineering be employed? How can teams maintain software for their sucessors to own?

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Innovate 2012 - Tales from Everest, and Attacking Issues on Skills

The morning keynotes were topped off with an inspirational story from mountain climber, and Mount Everest summit-er Jamie Clarke. Through his humor, wit, and clever story-telling, Jamie provided the audience with real motivation to persevere through difficult aspects of project development, learn from our mistakes, and embrace challenges and changes in order to reach our goals. His words were appreciated by everyone in the auditorium.

For my part, I presented on the IBM POWER systems track on the topic of developing applications for AIX, on AIX. I did my best to provide the audience compelling reasons for choosing to use AIX as not only a target deployment platform but also a development platform, making use of the latest features in Rational Developer for Power Systems, Rational Team Concert, and IBM PureSystems.

Later in the day, I had the honor of hosting panel discussion around best practices for Enterprise Modernization. Four people were on the panel - Phil Murphy of Forrester, Rick Slade of IBM, Peter Rasmussen of Danske Bank, and Richard Moran of Fidelity. These four panelists provided the audience with their experiences in the area of enterprise modernization, and on topics that ranged from application portfolio management, to aligning IT and business goals for application development projects, to addressing perceived skills gaps in application development teams in many organizations. On this last point, it was the consensus of the panel as well as those in the audience that there are ample capabilities among people entering the software development workforce to learn, use, and master whatever programming languages and runtime environments which are in use today.

Further, in many cases, what may appear to be "legacy" in some peoples' eyes is actually viewed as new, interesting, and something to be excited about for people that are new to the environments - resulting in the realization that System z and mainframe systems are often something of keen interest to people joining the commercial software development workforce. IT organizations should embrace this inquisitive attitude in new employees, re-charging their application development workforce and bringing new ideas to existing applications.

It has been very refreshing to see this shift in attitude around enterprise modernization!